East Germany Closes Its Border To The West 1961 FILM DIRECT

Thanks for reminding us SGT John " Mac " McConnell that like Korea, once communism took hold in East Germany many fled to the west. In East Germany's case, many fled through the somewhat porous border to West Germany. When that exit closed many fled to West Berlin. With many East Germans fleeing East Germany began building the wall around West Berlin. That resulted in the Berlin Airlift and the Candy Bomber which were propaganda coups for the west.
Images: Colonel Gail Halvorsen , the Candy Bomber; Berlin airlift pallet ready for loading; Berlin Blockade and Airlift, June 1948.; Blockade Ends - Airlift Wins

The situation in Korea was parallel. After WWII ended, USSR administered the north while the USA administered the south. Families were able to reunite through somewhat porous borders initially. The ability to cross became problematic but there were periods when families could be reunited. About 10% of the North Korean population migrated south in the first decade 1945 to 1955. "The available estimates fluctuate between 0.9 to 1.6 million, so it will be fairly safe to say that in 1945-1953 over 1 million North Koreans fled to the South."
As East Germany crumbled after the USSR, I hope in our lifetime North Korea will throw off the yoke of communism.

"North-South migration, part 1: Years of exodus 1945-1953
National division led many groups in North Korea to look for a way out
Andrei Lankov February 10th, 2014
The division of Korea also brought about the phenomenon of illegal migration from the North to the South (as well as in the opposite direction). The nature of this migration has changed throughout the 70 years of division, and it seems that in the past 2-3 years we have witnessed another change. This four-part mini series deals with the four distinct periods in the history of this migration: 1945-1953, 1953-1990, 1991-2010 and 2011-present.

The history of defections began at the time of Korea’s division. As soon as in August and September of 1945, the year of Korea’s liberation from Japanese colonization, Soviet and American troops took over their respective parts of the Korean Peninsula, placing movement across the 38th parallel under their control. Theoretically, cross-border trips could be sanctioned only in some special cases, but in practice until 1948 the nascent intra-Korean border was poorly protected, so people who attempted to cross it had high chances of success.

There was no shortage of people who would consider moving south from late 1945 onwards. Some of them were motivated by purely personal reasons: the division came suddenly, so many families were divided, and people sometimes walked south just to re-unite with their spouses and children.

Far more frequently, though, border-crossers were the people who had good reason to dislike the system beginning to take shape in the Soviet-controlled North. Some significant groups of the population were singled out as suspicious or hostile by the new authorities – and, understandably, began to consider an exit option.

EXIT OPTION
To start with, more or less all former employees of the colonial administration were immediately branded collaborators and began to face significant and growing discrimination. An exception was sometimes made for those few who had valuable technical skills – like medical doctors or engineers, but even those people felt uneasy in the new situation. Even clerks who once worked at a county office were likely to be considered ex-collaborators. So, these people were likely to pack.
“People who lost their land began to wonder whether it would make sense to live under this new regime”
The former landlords constituted another large group among the escapees. In March-April 1946 the North Korean government conducted a radical agrarian reform, whose blueprints had been developed by the Soviet military authorities. As a result of the reform, some 400,000 households lost their lands partially or entirely. Unlike China, where the land reform was accompanied by a wave of terror directed against the former landlords, in North Korea the developments were generally non-violent, and landlords were allocated some plots elsewhere. Nonetheless, people who lost their land began to wonder whether it would make sense to live under this new regime.

Christians constituted another important and large group that found itself increasingly under pressure. While Kim Il Sung himself was born to a family of Christian activists, and his relative Kang Ryang Uk was appointed to head the pro-government Christian association, the new government did not make a secret of its views on religion. All religion was bad and reactionary, but Christianity, being introduced by the Westerners, was especially dangerous due to its inherent connections with the imperialist West, so the Christians were suspicious by definition. This was a bad news for Christians whose positions in what is now North Korea used to be particularly strong – it will suffice to remind that in the late 1930s Christians made some 30 percent of the population in Pyongyang while in Seoul their share was about 1 percent. Once pressure on Christians began to mount, priests and activists began considering an exit option.

Supporters of the nationalist right were another group, numerically small but politically significant, included among the refugees. For a brief while the leader of the nationalists in the North, the formidable Cho Man-sik, was even allowed to found his own political party. Obviously, in late 1945 the Soviet authorities still hoped that cooperation between the Soviet-sponsored communists and the nationalists would be possible. However, in early 1946 the short-lived coalition of communists and nationalists collapsed, and Cho was arrested, along with a number of his supporters. To many local North Koreans he remained a symbol of resistance and national pride, so his sorry fate under the new regime caused them to move south (and, of course, many of these activists knew that they faced high probability of arrest if they didn’t).

Technically, the escape was easy in 1945-46 and not prohibitively difficult until 1950. There were people who were arrested while crossing the border, and some would-be refugees were shot dead by guards, but in most cases one had to merely wait for night and then walk across the poorly marked demarcation line.
KOREAN WAR CATALYST
With the outbreak of the Korean War, the number of defectors increased significantly. To some extent this was an unavoidable result of the outbreak of violence: Many North Koreans just fled approaching frontlines, without caring too much about politics. On the other hand, the people who lived far north, hundreds of kilometers away from the 38th parallel, suddenly received an opportunity to leave the communist-controlled territories if they wished to.

From June 1950 to April-May 1951 the Korean War was a war of fast maneuvers and ever-changing military fortunes. Cities and villages changed hand frequently – Seoul itself was taken and re-taken four times, and most cities changed hands at least twice. In this situation the disaffected could easily vote with their feet and walk with the retreating troops from the side they liked more (or, as often was the case, disliked less). The escape became far more difficult after the frontlines solidified by the summer of 1951, but by that time large numbers of Koreans moved from the north to the south (and somewhat smaller, but still significant, numbers took the opposite direction).

“About 10 percent of the entire North Korean population moved South in the first decade of North Korean history”
Given the sorry state of the Korean bureaucracy in those chaotic years, one should not be surprised that the number of refugees from the North are not known with any precision. The available estimates fluctuate between 0.9 to 1.6 million, so it will be fairly safe to say that in 1945-1953 over 1 million North Koreans fled to the South.

At any rate, the numbers are large. About 10 percent of the entire North Korean population moved South in the first decade of North Korean history. This scale of migration is unprecedented even in the history of the Communist Bloc, whose population was often in habit of running from the would-be paradise. In the long run, this massive exodus had serious political consequences. It might, for example, have contributed to strengthening the stability of the North Korean regime. In a sense, the potential opposition to Kim Il Sung rule exiled itself.

On the other hand, these people eventually formed an influential and vocal community inside South Korea. Most of them could not take any valuables when they were fleeing their native towns, but they came from better-educated parts of society (and it helped that at the time northern provinces prior to division were more advanced and sophisticated than in the south). Many members of the older generation had a hard life in South Korea, at least initially, but the younger migrants, as well as the second generation of refugees, was remarkably successful, and are now overrepresented in the South Korean elite. At the same time, these people often found themselves dragged into the politics of the official anti-communism dominating South Korea in the first decades of its history. In many cases, their anti-communist zeal was sincere, though: most of these people had powerful political reasons behind their decision to leave the North.

It is also important that many of the refugees are former landlords who took their land titles when they were fleeing in the 1940s. Their land claims might be valid under the current legal regime of South Korea, and this might develop into a big issue if and when two Koreas unify.

It is noticeable that the few surviving refugees and their numerous descendants tend to keep a distance from later arrivals from the North. Their legal standing is also quite different; in the current South Korean law only those individuals who arrived South after the 1953 Armistice was signed are considered defectors. In essence, the pre-1953 defections can be seen as pre-history of the defectors/refugees community in the South nowadays."
https://www.nknews.org/2014/02/north-south-migration-part-1-years-of-exodus-1945-1953/
COL Mikel J. Burroughs LTC Stephen C. LTC Ivan Raiklin, Esq. Capt Seid Waddell Capt Tom Brown CW5 (Join to see) MSG Andrew White SFC Joe S. Davis Jr., MSM, DSL SFC William Farrell LTC Bill Koski LTC Wayne Brandon SSG William Wall MSgt Jason McClish AN Christopher Crayne PO2 Harold Ashton Sgt Trevor Barrett SPC Tom DeSmet SGT Charles H. Hawes SFC Jeffrey Thivierge, MA, BSN, RN

History is a lesson in what not to do sometimes....

Also remember this well. Major topic during high school current history class.